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Fossils as art historians?

What it would look like to read Bennett’s “vibrant materialism” and Toadvine’s argument for a phenomenological understanding of the nature of being in time as components of an art historical methodology? Since art history inquires into the material making and constitution of objects and phenomena, as well as the cultural beliefs and practices that have shaped both the fabrication and perception of these objects/phenomena across time and space, perhaps the discipline holds an implicit inclination toward what I understood in Bennett as the interconnectedness of the human and the material, and in Toadvine as an account of how material embodiment interweaves the time of the present with that of the past and future.

Conceptualizing the subject of art history as an assemblage and shifting from a horizontal to a lateral continuum would change the shape of the discipline. Rather than a progressive/teleological model moving linearly from “beginning” to “end” and conceptualized as a response to the hermeneutic problem, the discipline might look more like a rhizome, an entity that can be accessed at any and all points, not past or present but always in a state of becoming, encompassing “both the prehistoric, ancestral past and the eternity of an unimaginable future” (Toadvine, 277). In other words, less Hegel, more Deleuze and Guattari. Artists, art works, art historians, plants, animals, “objects” and “things”––all might be understood as comprising a flow of energy that can be directed towards certain goals. As Bennett writes, “[s]uch a newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations.”(13) Toadvine’s phenomenology can add ideas and temporalities, and maybe even art historical writing to that network.

But I am struggling a bit with how to get there, and maybe this is something we can think through together in class. Beyond the theory and into practice. Beyond directing the art historian or curator to engage with (already-existing or in-progress) artworks and practices that can be shown to take up ideas of vibrant materialism or phenomenological temporality, what methodologies can we use here that would be more agentive, more vibrant in their own right? I also hope we can talk more about where a study of methodology in art history overlaps with a study of ethics.

-- Brooke

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Reading Response 1